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Slavery and Anglo‐ Economic History Review, 0, 0 (2020), pp. 1–31 Slavery and Anglo-American capitalism revisited † ∗ By GAVIN WRIGHT British and American debates on the relationship between slavery and economic growth have had little interaction with each other. This article attempts intellectual arbitrage by joining these two literatures. The linkage turns on the neglected part two of the ‘Williams thesis’: that slavery and the slave trade, once vital for the expansion of British industry and commerce, were no longer needed by the nineteenth century. In contrast to recent assertions of the centrality of slavery for US economic development, the article argues that part two of the Williams thesis applies with equal force to nineteenth-century America. Unlike sugar, cotton required no large investments of fixed capital and could be cultivated efficiently at any scale, in locations that would have been settled by free farmers in the absence of slavery. Cheap cotton was undoubtedly important for the growth of textiles, but cheap cotton did not require slavery. The best evidence for this claim is that after two decades of war, abolition, and Reconstruction, cotton prices returned to their prewar levels. In both countries, the rise of anti-slavery sentiment was not driven by the prospect of direct economic benefits, but major economic interest groups acquiesced in abolition because they no longer saw slavery as indispensable. he relationship between slavery and the industrial revolution is one of the oldest T debates in British economic history. On the American side, a parallel debate about slavery and economic development has been largely separate. Originally concerned with the profitability of slavery, attention in the American literature then turned to issues of efficiency and productivity, and most recently to the role of slavery in US economic development.1 Remarkably, these two conversations have had almost no connection to each other, with the notable exception of Beckert’s Empire of cotton, which links the technological revolution in cotton textiles to the exploitation of slaves in the cotton fields of the American South.2 In this article, I propose to conduct intellectual arbitrage by joining these two literatures. The linkage, however, is not exactly seamless. While Williams argued that the slave trade and slave-based commerce were essential components of the eighteenth-century industrial revolution, he went on to assert that British ∗Author’s Affiliation: Stanford University. † Adapted from the Tawney Lecture, presented at the Economic History Society meetings in Belfast, 7 April 2019. The author thanks Steve Broadberry for the invitation to deliver the lecture, and John Clegg, Christian Dippel, Suresh Naidu, Richard Sylla, Warren Whatley, and Nuala Zahediah for comments on earlier drafts. Even more than usual, it should be stressed that none of these individuals are responsible for any of the views presented here. Dante Mangiaracina contributed outstanding research assistance. 1 A useful survey of the profitability and efficiency debates is Sutch, ‘Economics of African American slavery’. 2 The centrality of slavery for US development is argued in Baptist, Half has never been told; Beckert, Empire of cotton; and Beckert and Rockman, eds., Slavery’s capitalism. Critiques include Clegg, ‘Capitalism and slavery’; Hilt, ‘Economic history’; and Olmstead and Rhode, ‘Cotton, slavery and the new history of capitalism’. © Economic History Society 2020. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 2 GAVIN WRIGHT industrial development, ‘stimulated by mercantilism, later outgrew mercantilism and destroyed it’.3 In the dissertation that formed the prelude to his famous book, Williams was even more explicit: ‘The tremendous expansion of British industry and commerce was accompanied by the declining importance of the colonies which had once been the gems of the Empire’.4 In other words, abolition became viable in the nineteenth century because slavery and the slave trade were no longer the ‘vital props that spurred the rise of British industry’.5 Williams was right. After 1815, British manufactured goods found diverse new international markets, which did not require captive colonial buyers, naval protection, or slavery. Long-distance trade became safer and cheaper, as freight rates declined and international financial infrastructure developed. One need not glorify the ideology of free trade, nor deny the role of imperialism, to acknowledge that the world economy emerging after 1815 was different in fundamental respects from its eighteenth-century predecessor. The thesis advanced here is that this revolutionary economic restructuring applied with equal force to the upstart economy across the Atlantic. Insurgent scholars known as New Historians of Capitalism argue that slavery, specifically slave-grown cotton, was critical for the rise of the US economy in the nineteenth century.6 Beckert asserts: ‘It was on the back of cotton, and thus on the backs of slaves, that the U.S. economy ascended in the world’.7 Baptist writes: ‘Cotton also drove U.S. expansion, enabling the young country to grow from a narrow coastal belt into a vast, powerful nation with the fastest-growing economy in the world’.8 In essence, these historians are transporting the first part of the Williams thesis from the mercantilist eighteenth century to the industrializing economies of the nineteenth. But times had changed. The Atlantic economy of the eighteenth century was propelled by sugar, a quintessential slave crop. In contrast, cotton required no large investments of fixed capital and could be cultivated efficiently at any scale, in locations that would have been settled by free farmers in the absence of slavery. Early mainland cotton growers deployed slave labour, not because of its productivity or aptness for the new crop, but because they were already slave owners, searching for profitable alternatives to tobacco, indigo, and other declining crops. Slavery was, in effect, a ‘pre-existing condition’ for the nineteenth-century American South. To be sure, US cotton did indeed rise ‘on the backs of slaves’, and no cliometric counterfactual can gainsay that brute fact of history. But it is doubtful that this brutal system served the long-run interests of textile producers in Lancashire and in New England, as many of them recognized at the time. As argued here, the slave South underperformed as a world cotton supplier for three distinct though related reasons: the region agreed in 1807 to close the slave trade and failed 3 Williams, Capitalism and slavery, p. 106. 4 Williams, Economic aspect, p. 199. 5 Ibid., p. xv. 6 The most prominent works by New Historians of Capitalism pertaining to slavery are Baptist, Half has never been told; Beckert, Empire of cotton; Johnson, River of dark dreams; Schermerhorn, Business of slavery;and the collection edited by Beckert and Rockman, Slavery’s capitalism. Critical surveys include Clegg, ‘Capitalism and slavery’; Hilt, ‘Economic history’; Oakes, ‘Capitalism and slavery and the Civil War’; Olmstead and Rhode, ‘Cotton, slavery, and the new history of capitalism’. 7 Beckert, Empire of cotton, p. 119. 8 Baptist, Half has never been told, p. 113. © Economic History Society 2020 Economic History Review,0,0(2020) SLAVERY AND ANGLO-AMERICAN CAPITALISM REVISITED 3 to recruit free labourers, making labour supply inelastic; slave owners neglected transportation infrastructure, leaving large sections of potential cotton land on the margins of commercial agriculture; and because of the fixed-cost character of slavery, even large plantations aimed at self-sufficiency in foodstuffs, limiting the region’s overall degree of market specialization. These shortcomings in cotton supply had larger ramifications for the course of US development. The slave South became increasingly isolated from the national mainstream, as manufacturers found their most inviting market opportunities in the expanding farm populations and cities of the free states. By the late antebellum period, the slave states emerged as a principal obstacle to the activist growth agenda supported by leading industrial and financial interests. Can we say, then, that both British and American slaveries were abolished because they had outlived their economic usefulness? Historical political economy is rarely so clear-cut. There is little evidence that prospects of direct economic gains drove the historical rise of anti-slavery sentiment. In both cases, however, major economic interest groups acquiesced in abolition because they no longer saw slavery as indispensable for their political or economic agendas. The argument proceeds as follows. The first section reviews the state of scholarship on the role of long-distance trade for eighteenth-century British manufacturers. The next part shows that these growing markets were dominated by slave-based commerce, primarily sugar, and argues that this expansion would not have occurred with free labour. This structure is then contrasted with the international economy emerging after 1815, in which British firms sold their wares in diverse growing markets around the world. Attention then shifts to North America and the rise of cotton, arguing that slavery was linked to cotton through historical legacies rather than technological or economic imperatives. Despite high returns to slave owners, the region underperformed as a cotton supplier, in comparison to a family-farm alternative. As events unfolded, the
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